After an early dinner, last night — Kathleen was grinding away on a project that had kept her busy all weekend — I finished reading In a Summer Season and immediately wrote to Peter Cameron, to tell him that a scene toward the end of Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth novel had evoked for me an apparently unrelated scene in his new novel, Coral Glynn. This evocation was a visceral upset, not a cerebral matching up of references or similarities. There were none of those that I could see. Nor was this some vague sense of déja vu. It was, rather, as though Coral had been standing behind Edwina in her “smart, dead” drawing room and exchanging glances with Kate. I knew that, if I were going to write about this unprecedented experience at all, I had better do it right away, and that, while striving for concision, I ought to include every pertinent detail of what I called a moment of “synesthesia.” It wasn’t, technically. Synesthesia is the blending, or confusion, of two different senses. But I did have the most uncanny sense of re-reading Coral Glynn even as I was reading In a Summer Season for the first time. It didn’t occur to me later that some readers might find in this an artistic failure of some kind, a staleness perhaps. But there was nothing stale about it for me; I was thrilled. The act of reading was, for a moment, electric in an entirely new way.  

Then I tried to pick a movie to watch. Ideally, it would have been Brief Encounter, only comic and in color. That is, it would have been Elizabeth Taylor’s version of Noël Coward’s fabulous tear-jerker, and not a tear-jerker at all. Sadly, this movie does not exist, so I found myself torn between Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which is an adaptation of a novel by Taylor, and The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s 1961 transposition of Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw. What The Innocents has to do with Taylor I couldn’t begin to tell you, but I suppose you could say that it was a movie that Taylor might have seen. What interested me wasn’t so much Freddie Francis’s remarkable cinematography, dreamy yet stark at the same time; I’d noticed that before. Nor was it Deborah Kerr’s operatic but Gothic reprise of her King and I role, as a governess in crinolines. What struck me was the madness of the screenplay. The screenplay is attributed to William Archibald and Truman  Capote, with “additional scenes and dialogue” provided by John Mortimer. (All very top drawer!) It is not nearly as unsettled as the novella. James leaves the governess’s soundness of mind open to question. There is a distinct possibility that she is imagining things. Not in the movie, however. The adapters’ governess may be a little intense, a little too presumptuously the angel of virtue, but she is not out of her mind. She knows what’s best for the children, and it isn’t to protect them from the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel. It’s more therapeutic than that, more in tune with the times of 1961. The governess is convinced that the only thing that will release the children from the ghostly spell of her predessor and her predecessor’s lover will be the little ones’ open acknowledgment of their corruption. You may agree or disagree about the wisdom of this treatment, but you won’t be wondering if Ms Kerr’s character is seeing things that aren’t there. This shift makes the movie itself, and not the governess, seem to be hysterical and overwrought. And not, I think, very faithful to the spirit of James’s story, which I shall have to re-read to be certain.

I watched The Innocents first, then Mrs Palfrey. I have been telling everyone that Dan Ireland’s 2005 adaptation is very faithful to Taylor’s (penultimate) novel. That can only have been because I hadn’t seen the movie in a while. The things that the filmmaker’s do to lighten up Taylor’s novel all work to infantilize it. Take Ludo’s mother, for example. There is no scene in the book in which Mrs Palfrey gets to tell Ludo’s mother how nice her son is, and it’s unlikely that Ludo’s mother would be affected by the remark. And the other elderly guests at the Claremont! They’ve been severely denatured. Mrs Arbuthnot, for example, is hardly the commanding figure that Anna Massey presents. Riddled with arthritis, she moves slowly and painfully with the aid of several canes, and in the night she cannot bring herself to get out of bed and walk down the hall to the communal loo. With the result that she is quietly asked to leave the Claremont. No dramatic collapse on the dining-room floor for her! Mr Osborne and Mrs Post are both made to be slightly dotty but basically lovable codgers. They’re not. In the novel, they’re sere, stunted trees, casting a malignant shade. I don’t think that the film gains anything by these softenings.

Finally, there is Joan Plowright herself. Ms Plowright gives a star turn in the title role, and no mistake, but she is ultimately too feminine for the part. She may be an old lady now, but she was a beautiful slip of a girl once, as you’ve only to see The Entertainer to understand, and that soft slip of a girl is still walking around in Joan Plowright’s body. What would have been better, could they have had her, would have been the late Joan Sanderson, the grimly frugal Mrs Richards in the great Fawlty Towers episode about flying tarts and a view of the wildebeests.

All the same, both movies are great to watch, and I enjoyed them more than ever for enjoying them a little more critically.

***

My visitor, George Borden, is, I’ve decided, an in-house accountant for an admiralty law firm. This means that he’s a steady worker more interested in stability than in big bucks, but also that he works in a small field, with not many genuine confrères. Whether or not George will still be an accountant working for a a specialty law firm by the time I’m done with him couldn’t matter less. The preliminary decision has taught me a lot about him, or rather allowed me to know him better. George’s wife, Alice, works for a charitable foundation whose funder is interested in public housing. The next thing to know is the character of the neighbor. Ah: I see that she is a retired executive secretary. What shall we call her? More important: is she the catalyst, the person who opens an unexpected door for George? Or is it someone to whom she is connected, someone who will take George out of his apartment building? Each one of these details is like a crumb of bread that, holding them out in my hands, attracts further details.

George’s story is about getting older, but it is not a story about decline.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 at 10:36 am.